Jay

Whenever I see Africans say "the solution to censorship is to just build our own platforms", I inwardly cry at the babyfaced naivety. It's as if they think that the reason nearly all major social media platforms are American is that Americans are better at coding or something. For those who aren't aware, social media is not profitable. Building a social media app is not particularly difficult. You can literally use AI to reverse engineer existing ones and put one together in a few minutes. There is nothing technically difficult about building or operating a social media platform. Any random Andela intern can do it. The real problem which NOBODY is close to solving is that even if you can get everybody to sign up and use your platform, the cost of keeping its server and personnel infrastructure running is prohibitively expensive, and the cost of gaining and retaining users through platform monetisation is also extremely expensive. Twitter for example, has literally never made money. Since genesis in 2006. That's 20 years of this site running 24/7, 365 days a year with outages happening only a few times a year for a few minutes at a time. That's 20 unbroken years of spending huge sums of money on Data centers. High latency servers. Backups and redundancy. Security. Development. Moderation. Government relations. Marketing. Who do you think pays for all this? Jack Dorsey? Elon Musk? Generous VC investors who throw money into a pit for 20 straight years with no route to profitability and keep pouring money in? The only entity in the capitalist world that spends vast amounts of money that way is the government. Only the government invests huge sums of money in things that have immense social or political power without having any direct way to meaningfully generate profit. From the perspective of the US government, it is a super deal because instead of spending hundreds of billions annually to monitor, surveil, and collect intelligence on the rest of the world, it can instead spend tens of billions annually to be the silent backer keeping these social media platforms running, and have the rest of the world voluntarily submit vast amounts of their personal data and political intelligence that it uses for its ends. You're not on a social media site. You're on a US government intelligence gathering and data surveillance platform. That is what Twitter is. That is what Instagram is. That is what Facebook is. That is what YouTube, Snapchat, Threads etc are. And TikTok by the way, is the Chinese version of the exact same thing, which is why it was forced to sell its US branch to Larry Ellison, a CIA contractor. So unless you have a government behind you that is willing to spend serious money and receive no profit as you vibe-code your latest attempt at an "African social media platform", allow me to inform you that you are generously wasting your bloody time. "Social media" is not a playground and "viral user signup" or "user network effect" is not a real thing. There are thousands, maybe millions of social media apps on various app stores. The reason why you have only heard of the American and Chinese ones is that those are the 2 countries whose governments have inexhaustible sums of money to funnel into digital surveillance disguised as "social media". So before inviting me or The Spearhead to join your umpteenth attempt at an "African social media platform", please find a government that is willing to back you first. If you don't have a government behind you like Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergei Brin do, please don't waste my time.